path: root/tomorrow/ch9/ch9.txt

Cut below and use for drive with 

jimmy and Chloe





Nine



I have to start moving, and start moving right now. It's around nine. I throw some clothes in a bag and drag them out to the car. I start the engine; it coughs and sputters to life. I go over and say goodbye to Jimmy and Chloe. "When are you going to be back?" He asks. I don't know... "Where are you going?" She inquires. I don't know... "How are you getting there?" That I know...

The engine hums. I keep it at fifty miles an hour. I can hear the noises of the individual pistons pulsating in controlled, rhythmic, patterns. The wind roars around me, but I don't hear it. There is only the steady purring of chaos harnessed, slipping through the air, sliding across the land. Over hills, valleys, and mountains, across bridges, rivers, and railroad tracks, through cities, towns and farms, under rain, sleet, and hail-the open road. The road goes on forever, scorched by the burning sun, it chaps and cracks, bleeding headlights like shooting stars or comets. No one ever drives quite like I have in mind-road as in nowhere-never ending dreams. 

It's a beautiful little country road, a peaceful Georgia night, I haven't seen another car for hours. I have no idea where I am. The back of my mind is in New York. It's dragging the rest of me with it. I have the passing thought that hearing the roar of the engine over the rush of the wind might not be a good sign, but I like the way it sounds. It gives the car an organic quality. Faintly, in the background, the sound of classical strings set to the pulse of a techno beat-the ancient modern, the archaic revival. I eschew the interstate in favor of two-lane blacktop. I am in no hurry to get anywhere. I just want to drive. To drive long distance is to meditate; there is nothing to do, nothing that requires any more than the animal function of the brain, the hard-wired instinctual circuits that I don't control anyway. The creative mind, the thinking mind, is free to roam the open road. I avoid interstates. They gloss over the details; they are wide and fast with no time for minutiae. The fabric of life is thinnest in the middle of an interstate highway. I trade speed for peace, convenience for time, and cold comfort for risk. I hang my arm out the window, and let it go limp to bounce with the wind. 

Just outside of Gordian, South Carolina, a canopy of oaks and red elms arch over the road, a dizzying rush of treetops sprays overhead. I slow down to thirty, set the cruise control and lean my head back. I'm gliding under the canopy, looking up at a fantastic blur of moonlit leaves. Silver swords cutting up the sky, sleek, and motion blurred. It looks like a high-speed film montage where you can almost tell what things are, but they move too fast to fully comprehend, always lingering just beyond the threshold of recognition. I feel myself lying on my back in a canoe sliding along the banks of the Amazon... They're not leaves at all, they're signposts, clues to the mystery, and every bit the key. 

A boarded up fruit stand-boiled-peanut vendors-an ancient downtown of false storefronts-it's impossible to tell if the inhabitants are asleep or deserted long ago. Go where the money is... it's a universal migration from here to the interstate highway. Human culture always following after it's own inventions. Eight hundred generations, six hundred and fifty thousand spent in caves, wombs, and incubators, hydroponically fed dreams from underground rivers. Then the dreamer woke to create a world with electric can openers, shrink-wrapped by a haggard thirteen year old girl in between enduring her uncles' assembly line gang rapes.... All this for that or all that for this?

The air behind me holds the tragedy of fall turning to winter. It offers backseat driving tips, whispering softly in my ear like a barroom parrot hissing the mimic of the voice-box smoker ordering another scotch on the rockssss. I stop for gas. I am higher in elevation; it's colder here. I put on my jacket and start the pump. I walk up the street to look at the old buildings. Faded, worn paint is shedding off the brick-framed buildings in giant sheets like lizard skin. I step back and admire the chaotic structure as I light a cigarette. Old advertisements are stapled to a board at crazy, maddening angles, pictures of cans, black eyed peas, peaches, moon pies-faded and whitewashed by years in the sun. Across the street a window reads: Ace Appliance Store. I wander over and put my face to the glass. I see televisions, radios, washing machines, drying machines, refrigerators, freezers, ovens, microwave ovens, convection ovens, alarm clocks, computers, headphones, video games, laser disc players, DVD players, record players, compact disc players, cordless telephones, wireless phones, digital phones, cellular phones, two way radios, short wave radios, car stereos, home stereos... Tons and tons of stuff. Endless stuff out here in America. I crush out my cigarette and walk back to the car. In the back seat is my single bag. I have four shirts, two pairs of pants, two pairs of shoes, socks and underwear, toiletries and a laptop computer. I don't have any stuff.

Feeling weary and defeated, I follow the signs to the interstate to find a motel. The interstate isn't here for you and I. No one built this road so we could drive on a convenient, straight, fast thoroughfare. It's wide and straight because Eisenhower was an army man. He wanted a way to move tanks, land fighter jets, and transport troops about the country. Should the need arise.... Driving it takes the rest of the wind out of my sails. I pull off at the first motel I see, plunk down my $40 to a sleepy looking attendant, and pass out for the night.

I dream that I'm in New York, living with Maya. Everything is wonderfully happy. I am lying in bed and she is on top of me, arms extended, back arched. Her face is perched above mine, blond locks framing a warm, joyous smile... and then something changes, she rears her head back and laughs like Satan when Hitler rolled into Hungary. My body is stiff as a board; she picks me up and heaves me out the window. I scream as I fall, but I don't hit the ground or wake up. Eventually I stop screaming. I keep falling and falling. A sickening feeling overwhelms me-vertigo-I can't see the ground below me. Eventually I turn over and look up. Maya's face is still clear, leaning out the window, as if I had not fallen at all, but only hovered just below her balcony. She is smiling again, but now it's a sad, crestfallen smile. I realize that she never threw me, it was my imagination. I jumped. She is crying because I am gone. I have made a tragic mistake. Floating in mid air, body wracked with sobs, I am overwhelmed by the realization that I will have to live the rest of my life with this mistake. There is no way to undo it-only move forward. I wake with a start.

It is just before dawn. I fumble for my cigarettes and light one. The dream leaves me feeling depressed and angry with myself. I smoke grimly, scowling at the walls. The room is nondescript, a common dresser, an ordinary mirror and two generic paintings hanging on the wall above my head. It feels like a prison cell. The acidic insides of my stomach gnaw at the fleshy walls begging for eggs, bacon and hash browns. I get up and look out the window; it's nowhereville, faceless buildings, ordinary landscaping, and second-rate views of the cold, insensitive freeway overpass. 

I pull on my pants, light another cigarette and flip on the morning news. People are cheating, stealing and dying all over the world. Glitter-faced entertainment hosts parade in fashionable clothes for my amusement. It's the same blue world. Nothing ever changes inside the box. Its comforting and horrifying at the same time. A cheap coffeemaker languishes on the bathroom counter, it seem energized the minute I turn it on. It rattles and gasps and makes gurgling noises as if waking from a long slumber. The television drones out the latest and greatest pop music as chosen by the careful market research groups at MTV. It's a terrible desolate scene this room, but it makes me happy. It is not nearly as bad as the dream landscape.

Around ten I check out at the front office. I skim the newspaper as the clerk prints out a receipt. According to the newspaper, Washington DC is the most violent city in the country. In the hills around Sarejevo, land mines still blow off limbs as a brutal reminder of the never-ending price of war. In India and Palestine the same religious zealots continue fighting the same wars their ancestors fought. In Madagascar eighty-five percent of the forest has been clear-cut for timber, the soil washes uselessly into the sea. In Washington State fifty four percent of the population still thinks clear cutting is a good idea. Sixty-five percent of the population of Zimbabwe has AIDS or HIV. Such happy things in the morning.

In Burma a Shaman is praying and wondering how long until the monsoons arrive to heal the parched farmland. In Tangiers a dying old man in a hospital bed is think about the American junky that used to buy groceries from his father's store.  

The road leads up into the capital. The tourists are thick as Florida sand fleas. The streets, the very concrete and asphalt beneath me, are laughing at all of us as they bear the silly game on their back day in and day out. 

I make my way out of town and start heading north again. My plan is to spend the night in Jersey and tackle New York tomorrow, but maybe I ought to just keep going. Maybe I ought to skip New York. Maybe I should just drive right on up to Maine, and then Canada, and then whatever is north of Canada; drive right into the arctic sea and jump out at the last moment. Maybe build an igloo, live off polar bear fat and never see anyone again. Maybe find the little hole that leads down into the hollow core where the dark-skinned survivors of Atlantis took refuge...

 Day fades to evening, fades to night. The ancient mistress hunger sings her siren song around nine and I stop at an all night diner in Pennsylvania. I sit in the corner and order up a plate of grease. Hard formica counters rise out of cold, concrete floors, scuffed and worn from trucker boots, treading season after season across the threshold, into the orange glow to rest the weary eyes. It calls up visions of lost highways, long gone past, dredges up images, blurring them together. Passing seasons traced out in the ark of headlights dragging across concrete freeway miles. 

There aren't very many people in this diner-a couple of truckers with ten-gallon hats, belt buckles, extend-a-bellies, and the requisite butt cracks. There is a thin, old man in a booth-the sort of man that's thin, and old, that you would expect to find in a diner booth. Three waitresses linger behind the counter. One is cooking on a giant grill while the other two gab and stare at their fake pink fingernails. As I get up to go to the restroom, I notice another man next to the truckers. He's a westerner. He has an extra-wizened face that can only be acquired by spending some time in the desert. I figure him for a Texan. He looks like he has been around the block. I notice him because he glares at me. His eyes challenge me as I walk past. I stop on my way back and spin a few tracks on the jukebox. Willie Nelson floats across the room, burying the ghosts of highway noise-the freeway semi-trailers flinging themselves through the night, headlights pulling the past into the future.... Lazy houseflies crawl up the wall reminding me of Ben's Broasted Chicken. 

I was headed up to the Tahoe area back in my hiking days. I went by way of the back road, 395, a rickety operation that gives you fantastic views of the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada. About three-quarters of the way to Tahoe you pass through Bishop. It's a logical place to eat. The only place really. There was a roadside dive called Ben's which advertised broasted chicken and corn on the cob for two dollars a plate. I wanted to know just what one did to a chicken to make it broasted. I ordered some up but I hardly ate, the enormous, lazy flies that crawled up the column next to my table distracted me. I can't recollect the chicken, but the flies were slothful, indolent creatures that didn't move when you swatted at them. They just gave up and died. I may have been the first person to swat at them. They might not have known what death was; they might have had free run of the world their entire lives. I might have created a fly culture myth of the grim reaper-the broaster. 

I try to put it all together, the passing seasons, the glaring Texan, and free-spirited flies squishing under the thump of newspaper. The Texan keeps craning his head and looking over at me suspiciously. Perhaps my fingernails are too clean, or my clothes not stained enough, to merit his respect. By the time I finish eating and light a cigarette, the truckers are gone. The thin old man evaporates leaving a trail of smoke. It's just me, the waitresses, and the Texan. All the sudden the Texan stands up and coughs loudly. The waitress, who had been grilling burgers, turns around and comes out from behind the counter. As their eyes meet, his face melts from a suspicious glare to a warm, loving smile. They hug and kiss each other and say some sort of goodbye. I see his face over her shoulder as he hugs her; he has a tender look in his misty eyes. He is no longer a glaring, suspicious stranger, but a simple, weather-beaten man escaping into the arms of a soft, plump waitress. He catches me staring at them; he smiles at me and rubs her back. For a flashing second everything in the world seems perfectly fine and sensible. They kiss again and he walks out the door without turning around.







Nine

Get rid of Chloe and Jimmy start letter to chloe thing put Dean on an airplane for Costa Rica.